Tired, frightened, honoured…

Well, this is it. I am nearing the end. I can feel it coming. I am so traumatised I have trouble even identifying ‘this’ as ‘it’. It would be more accurate to say that was that, or it was that, but never this is it.  So I’ll start again:

It was that. fwiw. A lifetime assault on a human being who never got up from the first punch.

Sorry, that’s no good either. I’m usually okay finding words. It’s probably a measure of how frightened I am that words hurt too. I cannot pick up a ringing telephone. It has got to the point where I have trouble opening emails. I certainly cannot open letters. These things are all containers. They contain hurt and pain. Outside there are some car doors slamming. That hurts too. Opening a book – that used to be the greatest pleasure of all – but I think now, what am I opening? what trauma is inside this text? What lessons hard-learned will be unlearned by reading a fictional anecdote? So now reading hurts, or it has the potential to harm, or harm further. Everything is a trigger. Absolutely everything.

I always wondered why I never cut much, never learned the comfort of a self-inflicted wound – but now I know. It’s because everything is cutting me all the time. There’s not one thing that isn’t wound-inflicting. All the cutting of me has been done externally by others. Self-cutting would have been an act of collaboration. I don’t co-operate with this world, or with the people in it. Even the places hurt me. And the place-names.

Which brings me to another point – sometimes I regard myself as a place-holder, or a marker. You know like – the person I could have been or was meant to be got delayed, and I’m just keeping his place in the line. But he’s not coming back. Maybe he had an accident. I only met him briefly before he was waylaid. Time for me to drop out of his place in the line and stop being an imposter. They say at Hiroshima the shadows of people were burned onto walls – that’s how I feel. A shadow seared into or out of life by pain, and pain alone.

I’ve been alone for most of my life so I don’t mind being alone at the end. What galls and terrifies is the aftermath – for a time my body will not be alone. It will be washed and cleaned, dressed and laid out, mourned – people will touch my hands as a blessing; hands they never sought to touch in life; I don’t want them to do that. Absentee landlords. Which is why I would like to die in a remote spot and rot, out of sight and out of mind. But it appears that my home, while being somewhere where I can be ignored, is not somewhere where I can be forgotten. What an appalling dillema.

I said honoured too. Well, I have been honoured by some people on this site. They know who they are and I hope they know how brave they have been to get between me and the blast. I have been honoured by my brother. There have been others over the years who honoured me until I forced them to withdraw it for one reason or another. If I can choose to carry anything out of this world with me then I choose the memory of those wonderful people.

I don’t believe in God. I don’t believe there’s an afterlife. I don’t believe in reincarnation. I don’t believe my energy will survive. I don’t want it to. I don’t want any part of me to remain because that part of me will only be the part that hurts the most. An eternity of pain is not a promise I will hear, it’s a lie. It must be a lie. Almost everything is a lie, why not that?